What is historical-data.org?

This site defines a collection of schemas (applied in the form of HTML tags) that webmasters
can use to markup their historical and genealogical information in a consistent way.

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is
formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications,
especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page
markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search
results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable
new tools and applications that make use of the structure.

Project Scope

The scope of this project is limited to defining the schemas for historical and genealogical
microdata that is designed primarily to enable
search engines, web crawlers, browsers, and other tools for enabling users to find and understand the historical
data contained on an HTML page. As such, the schemas defined by this project are designed to be lightweight and
generic and are not designed to support all of the intricacies of a rich research model that supports in-depth
semantic analysis and sophisticated bibliographic accountability.